Fast Forward on Moving Forward - Part One

It's been a while since I've been here. Okay, so it's been a long while; much longer than I thought it had been. If anyone has been reading this, I apologise for leaving things so... unfinished, I suppose. It feels a little awkward even being here, writing again, if I'm entirely honest. I'm not really sure what I'll be writing, or where I'll be going with this blog. It just feels like a good time to write again. Where have I been since late 2011? I can't even remember properly since it all seems so long ago. Life-wise, work-wise, I'm in the same place; working a 9-5, living with my partner, same friends, same family stuff. Food-wise, I'm in a somewhat different place. Having issues with food, eating and body image feels a little like living in a hall of mirrors, or being thrown down Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole: I never quite know what I'm going to see, or what to expect, of either myself or the world around me. I just get used to one new "normal", and then seem to move towards another, my feet having barely touched the ground in-between. Okay, so what's happened since then? I stopped attending the eating disorder support group sometime later in 2011, or maybe early 2012. I started to feel as if the group couldn't offer me the support I needed as someone who felt pretty much recovered from an eating disorder. The focus seemed to be on those new people who were only just acknowledging they had a problem with food, and I'd been over that ground too many times before. I carried on over-eating, which didn't bother me too much, really. I'd never gone back to the way I'd eaten before developing an eating disorder. Which makes sense really because it wasn't something I thought a lot about until I had the eating issues, and then it was all I could think about... You can't un-know what you now know, right? I just ate the way other people seemed to eat; often over-indulging in "treat" eats, and slowly gaining weight without really noticing. Having struggled for so long with the disordered eating, it was kind of a relief to not really think about it at all for a while. I just ate and then put it out of my mind. I figured that this was a part of recovery, and maybe it was being recovered itself. Fast forward to the start of 2013 and I wasn't feeling too great in my skin. I started to see what I looked like in the mirror, and I didn't like it too much. I was much heavier than I had been pre-eating disorder days, and over the previous year I'd gained a little more. My knees hurt when they'd never bothered me before. I got random pins and needles sometimes. My clothes were tight and didn't really fit too well anymore. I felt sad, and a bit ashamed of myself. I think what bothered me most was that didn't really look like me anymore. I don't think I had for a while, but it took me until then to really look and see, objectively, and without kicking myself so hard I'd look away again. I was slipping further inside myself, hiding in the back of my head. And I was angry with myself. Frustrated at the way in which I repeatedly self-inflicted pain through over-eating. Despite knowing so much about my issues with food, I had been acting them out, over and over. I saw what I was doing and I still didn't stop myself. I just let myself hurt me, making me slip further away from myself, and go deeper inside. And I'd had enough. Turns out, that this was what I needed to start making some changes.